Comment on a Website

[Terry]

I have been asked for my comments on a website - www.bohs.org. It is the website of a small professional organisation (of which I am a member) and is maintained by a "talented amateur".
I would be grateful for any constructive comments that you would like to give.

Thanks

Terry

BOHS Website (http://www.bohs.org)

[francis]

Wonders why Terry put "talented amateur" in quotes. Oh...

Nice - I've never seen anyone fake an unordered list using non-breaking spaces (the nav bar). If IE supported PNG opacity, then that lovely halo around the BOHS logo text (top right) could have been avoided (as long the the designer used a PNG, obviously).

Validation:

HTML (http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://www.bohs.org/&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline)
CSS (http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/validator?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.bohs.org%2Fthemes%2 FBOHStheme%2Fstyle.css&warning=1&profile=css2&usermedium=all)

Someone needs to point out the "Cascade" part of Cascading Style Sheets to the author (has horrible thought - this isn't Terry's own creation that he wants comment on, is it?).

The blue hurts my eyes after more than a few few seconds.

That's my opening salvo. Anyone else?

[francis]

David - both the links in the above post aren't working, which is strange as I copied and pasted them straight out of the address bar. This happened on your "tables vs css" post last week as well. Any ideas why?

[Terry]

No it is not my creation - I had nothing to do with it - honest guv. The quotes are from "a senior society officer"!

Terry

[David]

The BOHS site seems to be based on some sort of PHP based CMS (content management system), maybe something off the shelf like PHP Nuke (http://www.phpnuke.org/) and therefore, the layout etc. is basically a template (I'm guessing). Beautiful it certainly is not but it does seem to function propery. I agree with the comments above - blue on blue is a poor choice. I guess it's the kind of website you go to to get information quickly but you really wouldn't want to stick around. There is a lot to say about this site but I'll leave some of it to others.

Maybe I better add that extra layer of security before things get too hairy ;)

Francis, your two links seem to work OK for me although the CSS one seems to be misdirected.

[David]

B) Ugh, seems I've been looking at the BOHS website for too long. I managed almost 10 seconds without blinking and now I can't get rid of the after-image. It's not hard to work out why. Just found this...

"When choosing colors for your design, remember a few rules for mixing colors. The human eye cannot focus on red and blue at the same time. Trying to read red type on a blue background or vice versa causes extreme eye fatigue. Your audience will not be receptive to your message if it hurts them to read it. Never, ever use blue type on a red background and even worse, is red type on a blue background"

See the original source at CreativePublic.com (http://www.creativepublic.com/visitors_area/using_color_vis.html)

Oh, and here's a technical explanation of the problem:
Why you should not use red text on blue backgrounds (http://www.deben.net/tips/webdesopticalredblue.htm)